Until now, Snapdragons have been targeted largely at those developing mobile phones, tablets and the like. It was highly unlikely that an 'ordinary' engineer could get their hands on a Snapdragon and just as unlikely that they would think about designing such a device into their product. And for good reason; the lifetime of a Snapdragon targeted at the mobile phone industry is short.
But things have changed. The launch of the Snapdragon 600E and 410E processors was accompanied by the acknowledgement that parts targeted at embedded applications need to be available for a minimum of 10 years.
Perhaps this change in marketing tactics is a consequence of Qualcomm's soul searching review of its operations towards the end of 2015. Although the official conclusion was that no changes were needed, the company may well have realised that it needed to broaden its horizons. A rumour regarding the acquisition of NXP would accomplish that in spades.
So, as well as continuing to serve the fast moving consumer electronics market, Qualcomm is now offering processors that, it claims, will appeal to those designing a variety of IoT applications. Although Arrow has been named as the first distributor for the latest pair of Snapdragons, Qualcomm says it will create a global network.
As such, the devices look well specified; integrating CPU, GPU, DSP and a range of connectivity, while offering high performance at low power - at least in Qualcomm's opinion.
It will be interesting to see whether the move is welcomed by embedded system developers and, interestingly, whether other companies in the market feel they need to respond.
One thing on which most observers will agree is that Qualcomm had a significant impact when it entered the mobile phone market. Will Qualcomm have the same impact on the embedded systems sector?
